It's funny how not long after deciding that I don't need everyone to like me and that I am allowed to let certain friendships fade, I find I am very quickly building up a list of people I no longer need in my life. Today's star (who will be called Andromeda) is one who I've come to realise isn't as fun as he appears on the surface. Among his many irritating traits, we had a discussion over respect for relationships, which is what finally pushed him from barely tolerable to not someone I need in my life.
Imagine you meet someone that you really enjoy spending time with. You find yourself looking forward to seeing them, and you always seem to have a lighter feeling in your heart after being with them. You finally realise, "Hey, I'm actually attracted to this person." So you work up the courage to finally make a move, and just before you're about to meet up with this person and ask them out, you bump into a mutual friend who drops a bombshell - this person you're so attracted to is already in a relationship. You don't know this other person, which explains why you didn't know about the relationship. What do you do?
I've always been of the thought that you chalk it up to bad timing - perhaps if you had met them earlier in life, something could have happened, but you didn't. So it's time to write stupid poetry, mope around in bed for a bit, listen to crappy love songs, and eventually get over them. They may one day be single, but you probably shouldn't hold your breath waiting for that to happen. You stay friends if you can bare it, otherwise, you slowly fade away, and go and meet new people.
Andromeda has a different view. He thinks that you should just go for it anyway. Look at it this way, either this person is in a serious relationship, and turns you down, or their relationship isn't that serious and this person now considers you a potential candidate for replacement. You either cut your losses and stop wasting time pursuing something that'll never be, or you end up getting this person that is so amazing. As for the partner, who cares? You don't owe them anything, and if this person was willing to leave in the first place, then you were really doing them both a favour as the relationship can't have been going so well anyway.
Putting it that way, Andromeda's point actually makes sense. If you think that everyone is just out to find their perfect match, and that if you meet someone you happen to get along with better than your current partner, it's probably worth it to give it a shot, otherwise you'll regret every time the two of you get into an argument. Still, it just doesn't sit with me very well. I hate the thought that even once you're in a relationship, you constantly have to compete to stay on top, rather than spend your energy enjoying the relationship.
I also think that people should have respect for other people's relationships. A bit like this scene from Scrubs, where JD realises women with wedding rings are invisible to him, guys in relationships mostly drop off my radar. There was the exception of Daniel, but given the way that I thought he was flirting, I feel like that was a special circumstance. Char also calls married men "safe", I guess because she knows nothing will ever come out of it and so she can just be herself. I like to believe that if I respect the relationships around me, my own will be respected in return, and I won't have to constantly worry that someone is trying to steal MrMan5.5 away from me.
The last point against it I have is the greener pastures effect. This one is a bit more from the point of view of the person in the relationship, rather than the one who is encroaching on the relationship. You may think that this person that you suddenly "click" with is really great, and it seems like they're better for you than your current partner, but how much have you really had the chance to get to know them? I'm sure things with your current partner started off really great as well, and you had that awesome feeling whenever you saw them. Then the honeymoon period ended and normalcy hit. Yet your relationship still managed to hold together. Do you think that will happen with this new person once the novelty effect wears off?
I wrote a long time ago about RH - someone who I had feelings for who got engaged and is now married. I ended up seeing him at PAX last year - though he did not see me as he was one of the panelists. I can't remember when the last time I spoke to him was, but it finally burst the bubble for me. We were talking about how I once stopped by his house with the promise of receiving pizza (I was so easy to bribe in my uni days), and sex was on the agenda, but in the end, I turned back, because I didn't want things to become awkward between me and his brother, who I was very close to at the time. He said that he was totally OK with not telling his brother, and if I hadn't turned back, he would have bought me everything I could possibly have wanted.
I just felt so insulted by that last comment. We were both really into World of Warcraft, I had spoken to him many times about programming related things, I don't know what I had done to give him the impression that I was the kind of girl who is interested in getting presents all the time, but if that's what he thought of me, then maybe he didn't know me so well after all (yes, there's that female neckbeard leaking out again!).
Up until that point, he could do no wrong in my eyes. So much about him was perfect to me, except the part of him being married (which didn't happen until long after we had stopped speaking). I think a lot of that was due to the fact that our friendship never went past the honeymoon stage. We spoke every night, but he would go to work, and I'd go to uni, and we'd both have our WoW raids (on opposite factions, so it wasn't even like we could talk to each other in game). It wasn't like we were in each other's faces all the time, so the absence made the time we spent together all the more precious. We never fought because we had nothing to fight about - and because we hadn't ever met in person, we still had that semi-anonymous Internet intimacy between us. We did dual each other for photos (I think in the end, I was 9-1, but I got a photo eventually!), and I guess we both found each other non-repulsive enough to still be attracted to each other.
Being with MrMan5.5 for this long has made me proud that I stayed around during some of the tougher times. It wasn't always as easy as it is now, and even now, sometimes we have problems with each other. But if I had ditched him for the first guy to ask me out when I was in a relationship, then... I'd be with Cheka. The guy who befriended MrMan5.5, and who MrMan5.5 supported even after he started behaving inappropriately, and then the guy who tried to steal MrMan5.5's girlfriend.
No comments:
Post a Comment